Many of today’s fastest-growing companies understand the power of community. Through community-led growth (CLG) efforts, they drive awareness, customer acquisition, and customer retention by nurturing and supporting a community of users, champions, contributors, customers, and prospects.
Community-led growth, which accelerates the growth of the business alongside product-led growth and sales-led growth, is predicated on community growth, the cultivation, and success, of the community as a whole. The success of both of these is intertwined. Community-led growth requires an active and thriving community. But community leaders can sometimes struggle to get resources to build a community without first proving the impact of their efforts on the business—which community-led growth provides.
Adding intelligence through artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies propels both initiatives forward by surfacing actionable insights from data:
In this blog, we’ll dive into intelligent community growth and its relationship to community-led growth. We’ll also take a look at the technology that powers these efforts, and discuss how you can best leverage an intelligent community-led growth platform.
Before we discuss the emergence of intelligent community growth and its benefits, let’s review the key concepts related to community growth and CLG.
To date, community growth efforts have been very manual. Many community managers spend hours reading through pages and pages of threads across different channels to keep a pulse on trending topics, sending individual welcome messages to new community members, and tracking engagement via detailed spreadsheets. As communities grow, these manual processes become increasingly laborious and unsustainable.
And there’s a limit to how much data you can capture from manual community management efforts alone. In the past, community growth happened in a silo. It was not possible to connect data about community engagement efforts to product or go-to-market data. The result? A limited understanding of why community matters and how it contributes to the success of your organization.
Intelligent community growth combines community data with AI and ML technologies to scale and maximize the opportunities presented by the community. This combination provides insights and context that can help automate manual processes to save time and create more efficiency, integrating data streams to help community managers and go-to-market leaders generate real insights to drive business success.
Intelligent community growth enables community managers and go-to-market leaders better understand their community and turn a community into a strategic business advantage. It’s a more proactive and strategic way to approach community management and generate real insights from the treasure trove of data collected within a community. These insights then power community-led growth.
The benefits of intelligent community growth include:
From a resource perspective, intelligent community growth enables you to do more with less. With a layer of intelligence collecting, analyzing, and interpreting community happenings, companies can focus on innovation and action instead of reactionary management.
How does it work? Intelligent community growth leverages a combination of artificial intelligence, natural language processing technology, and automation tools that unlock the above benefits and enable community-led growth.
Intelligent community growth uses artificial intelligence and natural language processing (NLP) to combine community engagement, product usage, and customer data into a single place and turn community engagement into actionable insights.
In addition to using data to better understand members and surface what’s most important to them, intelligent community growth also uses automation to facilitate action on those insights. The ability to initiate automated action is a huge differentiator between traditional community management and intelligent community growth—automations create efficiencies and enable community management at scale.
Intelligent community growth efforts are fueled by data and the ability to derive insights from this knowledge from across a community. A community-led growth platform uses AI and ML technologies to enable intelligent community growth and community-led growth.
For both of these efforts, organizations must connect data from disparate sources—including social media platforms, community forums, developer tools, sales and CRM tools, and more. Connected data sources are the best way to create unified community member profiles across sources, quantify the impact of community, and measure end-to-end community attribution.
Common Room’s platform includes over 20 native, out-of-the-box integrations to bring together all of your organization's data sources in one place. Common Room provides a holistic view of your community efforts and ties them to business outcomes.
In addition to the data integrations, Common Room’s community-led growth platform includes several pre-built intelligent actions to help community managers and go-to-market leaders immediately act on data insights. These include auto-categorization and conversation threading tools, powerful filters which enable you to create persona segments, and pre-built and customizable reporting templates that you can share and export to show the growth of your community and its impact on the business.
To intelligently engage and grow your community, try Common Room for free today. Looking for more? Connect with 1000+ community and DevRel leaders to share expertise and ask questions in the Uncommon community Slack.
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